Signs Of Those Times

Nixon buff Dona Christensen (@donachristensen on Twitter) has been a persistent critic of former UPI reporter Donald Fulsom, whose book Nixon's Darkest Secrets, published early this year, failed to make the bestseller lists despite salacious if unproven charges about 37's personal life. You can follow their debate at Amazon.com, where Fulsom has also posted a critical review of Lamar Waldron's new Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, the Mafia, and the CIA. Fulsom called it "an incoherent mess." Takes one to know one, Christensen replied. Finally, Fulsom asked her:

Are you Ron Walker hiding behind a woman's skirts online? Sure sounds like it. If so, why not reveal your true name and shameful background? Ron Walker was an advance man for Nixon who delighted in storm trooper tactics on behalf of our most infamous politician. Are you the bully who got a big laugh out of pummeling to the ground elderly African-American women who dared to demonstrate against Nixon -- women who had to pull wooden splinters out of their hands for a week (Summers, page 277)? Pretty funny, eh? And, if you are Walker, just why are you defending as accurate a mistake-ridden, conjecture-based anti-Nixon book?

The principal source for unprovable allegations that Nixon beat his beloved wife, Summers is not a paragon of truth. But his book contains direct quotes from Nixon operative Walker. Here's the passage to which Fulsom refers, which concerns an operation Walker ordered against supporters of Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey:

Walker was in the lead car of a Nixon motorcade in New Jersey when a radio warning came of possible "difficulty with demonstrators." Humphrey supporters up ahead were brandishing posters picturing a large black pregnant woman and the legend "Nixon's the One!" -- a mocking play on the Republican campaign slogan.

"I wanted those signs down before Nixon got there," Walker explained. "We simply went in and pulled them down. All the black ladies came falling to the floor...And the people were sitting there, their signs were down and they were pulling splinters out of their hands for a week....I don't call that dirty tricks as much as, you know, guerrilla warfare."

Walker wasn't the only Nixon operative to misunderstand what "it's a free country" means. Summers also quotes him as saying he used off-duty police officers and firefighters to administer "hard knocks and stuff" to demonstrators. But in this case, Fulsom has demonstrated that he can be careless with secondary sources. The only African-American women present were the pictures on the signs, wrenched from the hands of citizens whose puerility was ennobled by the measures used against it.

Dona is in fact Dona, by the way.

God Weighs In On The Republican Party?

When an earthquake struck the Nixon library in June as he and other panelists discussed DOMA and Prop. 8, conservative former law school dean John Eastman got a round of applause when he said, "See what happens when you mess with traditional marriage?" The moderator, my Nixon brother Hugh Hewitt, headlined a blog post as follows: "God Weighs In On The Same Sex Marriage Debate?"

With a hurricane named for the great patriarch himself bearing down on Florida, the GOP has just canceled the first day of its convention. Was it the Ryan pick? The pre-1920 platform on women and abortion? No way. I trust with all my heart that God doesn't punish people with weather and falling buildings, including especially the three reported killed already by the hurricane. In June I praised Br. Hugh for the wisdom of his question mark; I only jokingly borrowed it for this post (before getting back to praying for all in Isaac's path).
Photo: USA Today

Godspeed, Neil Armstrong

We give thanks for his courage and for Richard Nixon not having had to give this speech.

On Behalf Of A Grateful Nation

Military honors this morning at All Souls cemetery in Long Beach for Commander Oren William Skeith (USN ret.), who died last month at the age of 90. The father of my St. John's friend Brian, Commander Skeith is survived by his brother, George, 93, and three children, eight grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

Base Attacks

And so it goes: Conservatives who've been slamming Joe Biden for his "in chains" gag are minimizing Mitt Romney's birther gag. Whether intentional or instinctual, both were signals to elements of the parties' bases: Respectively, African-Americans and fantasists.

Two Crises

Noting that the Romney campaign has not yet disseminated a "crisis narrative" as part of the process of humanizing its somewhat mysterious candidate, Sheryl Gay Stolberg obliges with an article describing his reaction to an auto accident in France in 1968, when he was serving as an LDS missionary, and Ann Romney's MS diagnosis 14 yeas ago. Age 21 at the time of the accident, in which a friend was killed, Romney was already cultivating cool:

“Mitt was deeply enmeshed in thinking about leadership,” said Douglas D. Anderson, a friend who is dean of the business school at Utah State University. “He developed a very early set of core beliefs and values that had to do with being cool under pressure, that had to do with looking for opportunities where others saw threats, that had to do with being analytical and somewhat detached in order to look at reality the way it is, rather than how it is being perceived by people who are driven by the hysteria of the moment.

“And out of that,” Dr. Anderson went on, “came a pattern of living that was reinforced by events like that critical accident in France.”

How Nixonian. Otherwise uninterested in introspection, 37 eagerly plumbed his crisis narrative and even wrote a book about it, Six Crises. He was acutely aware of his reactions to political and even mortal emergencies, bragging that he stayed calm and rational when others panicked. He applied the same discipline to a president's loneliest work -- making life-and-death decisions when his smartest advisers wildly disagreed with one another. Long before George W. Bush called himself "the decider," Nixon talked about "the April 30 decision" and "the May 8 decision," when he announced that he was sending troops into Cambodia in 1970 and B-52s to attack Hanoi and Haiphong in 1972.

Once he'd given himself enough time to decide, undecide, and redecide, as his aide and friend Ray Price called it, he rarely second-guessed himself. Soon after I'd joined Nixon's former president's staff, one morning in 1981 he wandered down the hall from his office in 26 Federal Plaza in New York, without a word handed me a copy of his memoirs with one of his business cards marking the May 8 section, and disappeared again. Media reports suggest that while making decisions about how to battle al-Qaeda and whether to send a team to find and kill Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama has brought the same steely qualities to bear.

Nixon didn't always keep his passions under control. He often felt far more deeply than he let on, and he came to regret some of the decisions he made when he was feeling angry or resentful. It would have been better if he'd occasionally delved deeper, according to the theory that the feelings we fully own are less apt to control us. But in addition to his severe introversion and shyness, Nixon had that World War II-Great Depression generation reticence going on.

Stolberg describes Romney as rarely bringing up personal matters and as having a charitable if not an empathetic temperament. "Mitt Romney will never disgrace the office," Anderson told her. "He will set an example of moral rectitude. But don't expect him to sit down and feel your pain." People do want a president who cares, especially in a country where everyone isn't white, male, straight, and rich. But a leader's inner process, including the ability to be unemotional and occasionally ruthless, is even more important.

"Raise Your Hand," Tom Jones and Janis Joplin

Open up your big heart. The Welshman and Texan performing in 1969, as though they'd always been meant to.
Hat tip to No Depression

Simpson-Bowled Over

With pulls revealing a shift to Mitt Romney on economic and fiscal issues, Andrew Sullivan says Barack Obama might lose unless he embraces Simpson-Bowles.

If You Love Your Country, Pay For Content

As newspapers struggle to find a financial model to replace display and classified ads, they've had to cut editorial staffs to the bone. Some stories aren't getting covered as well as before or covered at all. Believing the prevailing digital ethos, readers think they're entitled to get the news for free, as though good reporting sprang immaculately from Google's servers or gifted journalists would get themselves trained and then risk their lives in Kabul strictly as volunteers. It's also the fault of publishers failing to anticipate the change and of the old model itself, where revenue from department store ads was used to underwrite coverage of city hall, the Supreme Court, and power shifts in Beijing.

Someday internet advertising may generate the same revenue that print did. Until then, the responsible reading citizen must learn to pay for the production of professional editorial content the same way she pays for dry cleaning, groceries, and legal advice. Without trained reporters and editors, we're guaranteed to suffer more abuses of power. Cable TV zealots and the Starbucks-based hackosphere will fill the vacuum left by facts with twice their weight in opinions. Our media will be deaf, blind, and insufferably loud.

One recent example of the indispensability of old-fashioned journalism. At 9 a.m. this morning in New York City, someone opened fire. I heard about it on the radio and checked Huffington Post, but there were few details. So I went to the New York Times on my iPhone (for which I gladly pay a monthly fee) and found this article, posted within four hours of the event. Written with precision and terse eloquence, it's a masterpiece of team reporting, an everyday example of the fine but dying art of good newspapering, painstaking and often dangerous work that no one will or should have to do for free:

[The suspect] lived on the third floor of a six-story walk-up on East 82nd Street for about 18 months, said Guillermo Suarez, 72, the super of the building.

Every morning he had the same routine. He would leave the apartment between 7:30 and 8 a.m., say good morning and head to the McDonald’s on Third Avenue and 84th Street.

After about 20 minutes, he would come back carrying a McDonald’s bag. He would nearly always wear the same thing — a tannish brown suit, sometimes with a tie. Then he would generally stay in the apartment the rest of the day.

He did the same thing on Friday morning, but this time he did not come back.

If you love your country, and if you really want to know what's going on in the world, pay for content.

Bloggers Rush In

Owing to the slow pace of hometown reporting on the controversy, it remains unclear whether Saddleback Church's Pastor Rick Warren snubbed Barack Obama and Mitt Romney or they snubbed him.

So speculation abounds. Naomi Schaefer Riley thinks the president's miffed at Warren, who's being, well, pastoral and giving Obama some cover:

One...suspects that Mr. Obama's refusal to participate has much to do with Mr. Warren himself, who publicly opposed the [free birth control] mandate. In February the pastor tweeted: "I'm not a Catholic, but I stand in 100% solidarity with my brothers & sisters to practice their belief against govt pressure."

So why is Mr. Warren covering for the president by suggesting that nixing the forum was Mr. Warren's idea?

Andrew Sullivan comes right out and calls Warren a liar for saying the cancellation was his idea and speculates about why Romney would never have risked sitting down with the world's most famous Christan evangelical:

[T]he idea that Mitt Romney would ever have agreed to sit down for fifty minutes to discuss the fact that he believes God was once a human being, that humans can become gods as well, that Israelite tribes once inhabited the Americas and that polygamy exists in the after-life ... well, it was never going to happen, was it?

Akin To Like Him

Mike Huckabee speaks up for the GOP's unmentionable man.

Iran: It's Getting Real

Charles Krauthammer is a policy wonk first and a Foxified partisan second. In this column, he keeps Obama-bashing to a minimum while painstakingly analyzing Anthony Cordesman's three-step plan for deterring Iran's weapons program, if any, without war: Making clear the U.S. will attack if necessary, showing Iran that it can't win by going nuclear, and offering the mullahs incentives for abandoning nuclear weapons that sound a lot like Nixonian detente.

Wrapping up, Krauthammer sounds worried that war is looming -- and if he's worried, so am I:

If we simply continue to drift through kabuki negotiations...one thing is certain: Either America, Europe, the Gulf Arabs and the Israelis will forever be condemned to live under the threat of nuclear blackmail (even nuclear war) from a regime the State Department identifies as the world's greatest exporter of terror. Or an imperiled Israel, with its more limited capabilities, will strike Iran – with correspondingly greater probability of failure and of triggering a regional war.

All options are bad. Doing nothing is worse. "The status quo may not prevent some form of war," concludes Cordesman, "and may even be making it more likely."

The Full Story Hasn't Quite Registered

The Orange County Register hasn't caught up with what others are reporting about Saddleback Church's decision to cancel its presidential forum. Pastor Rick Warren strongly implied to the Register that he'd withdrawn his invitations to Barack Obama and Mitt Romney because of their campaigns' incivility. But CNN's reporting suggests that neither candidate was ever planned to attend. As of this evening, the Register article, not updated since this morning, says it hadn't reached the campaigns. Maybe tomorrow's edition will have a followup story.

Warren announced in July that the forum would take place this week. When CNN contacted Saddleback Church today to get a comment about the candidates' evident disinterest in journeying to Lake Forest, Warren's spokeperson referred them to the Register article, which is evidently serving as a reliable expression of Warren's point of view, if not necessarily the full story.

Tampa Red

The Economist ruthlessly hammers Mitt Romney because of his flip-flops (that's far too small a word. He's undergone a complete conscience transplant since serving as Massachusetts governor) and the vagueness of his economic plan, concluding:

Mr Romney may calculate that it is best to keep quiet: the faltering economy will drive voters towards him. It is more likely, however, that his evasiveness will erode his main competitive advantage. A businessman without a credible plan to fix a problem stops being a credible businessman. So does a businessman who tells you one thing at breakfast and the opposite at supper. Indeed, all this underlines the main doubt: nobody knows who this strange man really is. It is half a decade since he ran something. Why won’t he talk about his business career openly? Why has he been so reluctant to disclose his tax returns? How can a leader change tack so often? Where does he really want to take the world’s most powerful country?

It is not too late for Mr Romney to show America’s voters that he is a man who can lead his party rather than be led by it. But he has a lot of questions to answer in Tampa.

Ryan's Hope

When is an issue not an issue? In the New York Times, Michael Cooper and Dalia Sussman report:

The Romney-Ryan proposal to reshape Medicare by giving future beneficiaries fixed amounts of money to buy health coverage is deeply unpopular in Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin, according to new polls that found that more likely voters in each state trust President Obama to handle Medicare.

And yet they report:

The race appears to have tightened a bit in both Florida and Wisconsin in recent weeks. In Florida and Wisconsin, where Mr. Obama had led Mr. Romney by six percentage points in polls conducted before the selection of Mr. Ryan, the race is essentially tied.

We Can't Have Politicians Being Hypocrites!

Because he is offended by their rocking, socking campaigns, Pastor Rick Warren says he has withdrawn his invitation to the presidential candidates to participate in a forum at Saddleback Church:

It would be hypocritical to pretend civility for one evening only to have the name-calling return the next day.

He's Mitt Me

Romney's broad agreement with the man behind Todd Akins' theories about rape and abortion.

The Real Ryan

Bush and McCain adviser Mark McKinnon on the Todd Akin crisis:

Hear that sound, GOP? That’s women running for the exits—and the big tent collapsing.

Mitt Romney, who owed the right absolutely nothing (as Richard Nixon would've told him two months ago in a ten-page memo), nonetheless pulled the big tent down around him when he let the tea party dictate a divisive VP pick. Rep. Paul Ryan's likeability temporarily kept casual observers and some pundits from appreciating that he's one of the most conservative figures in national politics. The dislikeability of his abortion and "forcible rape" policy partner is helping reveal the real Ryan, proving yet again that the gods of politics have a heart for justice and a sense of humor.

While I don't agree with Akin on much of anything, his authenticity is refreshing compared to a presidential candidate who abandoned the humane pragmatism of his gubernatorial years and a deficit-hawk running mate whose Bush-era votes helped add hundreds of billions to the national debt. If they lose in November, Republicans may one day identify Todd Akin as the unlikely prophet who helped them grasp what they had become.

What Rush Didn't Say Was No Fluke

On Rush Limbaugh's radio program this morning, a caller accused Rep. Todd Akin of having been paid off for torpedoing the GOP's chances to win back the U.S. Senate and perhaps even the presidency. Referring to Akin's theories about rape and abortion, the caller said, "Nobody believes that." Limbaugh replied, "I'm not sure nobody believes it" -- and then stopped. He said he had to go to a top-of-the-hour break and mumbled that it was probably better that he was being interrupted.

According to news reports, Limbaugh calls Akin's comments stupid and says that he hopes the congressman will do the right thing and quit his Senate race against the Democratic incumbent, Claire McCaskill (D-MO). I didn't listen to any more of his show today -- while driving I sometimes flip around among talk shows on KFI, KRLA, and KPCC -- so I don't know if he finished his thought about the prevalence of Akin's views.

One can't help wondering what he might have said. Mitt Romney, for instance, has accepted the support of an anti-abortion activist who believes, just as Akin does, that women's bodies have the power to terminate pregnancies that result from what Rep. Paul Ryan, Romney's running mate, and others call "forcible rape" (Akin's term was "legitimate rape"). Akin, Ryan, the GOP platform committee, and 20% of the American people want to make all abortion illegal without exceptions for rape or incest. They fear that in the pre-1920 conditions they envision for American women, those wanting or needing an abortion would lie and claim to have been raped.

So Limbaugh's right: Some people do believe as Akin does, and they're pretty powerful. Expressing the rest of whatever had bubbled to his lips might well have contributed to what Akin's critics seem to fear most: Voters realizing he's not an outlier. As an opponent of women's reproductive rights, Akin actually stands neck-deep in the mainstream of his party's thinking.

It's not a debate the GOP wants to have before the election, since when it comes to women's rights, its mainstream doesn't conjoin with the national mainstream. They're not even in the same time zone. Many conservatives still have trouble understanding that women (and a considerable number of men) won't let government dictate to them about abortion. The hard work of reducing the number of abortions instead requires the broad availability of sex education and birth control, gently encouraging women (think tax breaks and free college tuition) to carry unwanted babies to term and give them up for adoption, and better teaching and preaching about sex's sanctity and awe-inspiring generative power. But as long as Republicans insist that the way to battle abortion is to put women back in chains (thanks for that image, Joe Biden), Todd Akin is the poster boy they deserve.

Surely Temple

The president of the Palestinian Authority flirts with the preposterous, noxious idea that the first and second temples never existed.

You Say Legitimate. We Say Forcible.

Let's call the whole thing off, Republicans beg Rep. Todd Akin, who's running for Senate. They protest way too much. Hendrik Hertzberg details the similarities between his and Rep. Paul Ryan's views and policies:

Last year, Todd Akin and Paul Ryan were co-sponsors of a bill that would have specified a pregnancy resulting from “forcible rape” as the only kind that Medicaid or a health savings account could pay to end. A middle-school girl impregnated by her uncle or a sophomore coed subjected to the carnal aggressions of fraternity boys after a night of binge drinking would have to settle for the comfort of being told that her rape, like the baby the GOP would oblige her to have, was illegitimate.

The Honest Man

Rep. Todd Akin, GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate in Missouri, is in hot water with Republicans everywhere for saying that women's bodies have a secret plan for ending pregnancies that result from "legitimate" rapes (which he evidently distinguishes from falsely alleged or statutory rapes).

On the purely substantive level, it's hard to understand why they're so upset. He probably didn't come up with his weird theories by himself. It appears that he cribbed them from anti-abortion zealot Jack C. Willke, whose political support Mitt Romney has welcomed. From a practical policy perspective, Akin's position is indistinguishable from that of his party's platform writers and Romney's putative running mate, Paul Ryan. Along with 20% of the American people, Akin and Ryan and the Republican platform committee want to criminalize all abortion, including in the case of rape.

It's not the issue those now controlling the GOP want to talk about during elections. It's merely the policy they want to adopt while in office. They're mad at Akin for outing them. He should stay in the race and keep them honest.

Persian Detente

The National Interest, published by the former Nixon Center, endorses the view that the U.S. should be open to permitting Iran to have nuclear power without nuclear weapons.